he ever wanted to win the Academy's IrvIng G. Thalberg Memorial Award- named after a widely admired studio pi- oneer-he would have to change. Wein- stein was chastened. "This year, I decided to take Stacey's advice," he told me dur- ing one of several conversations we had in his Tribeca office. "I'm going to go out of my way: It's like Ariel Sharon- you can't be a lion of the desert and then not govern properly: At a certain point, it's time for the :fire-bombing to be over. You've got to know when the revolution has succeeded. Why do I have to keep fighting?" Yet something propels him, as the di- rector Julie Taymor discovered in March, two months after the Golden Globes party: Taymor, who created "The Lion King" for Disney on Broadway; directed "Frida" for Miramax. The film, which opened this fall to mixed reviews, is about the free-spirited Mexican painter Frida Kahlo and her marriage to Diego Rivera. Last spring, when Weinstein saw "Frida," he decided that the pace was too slow and that the fihn was sometimes con- fusing. After a test screening at an Upper West Side theatre in March, Pauline Sealey- Kitazato, Miramax's director of market research, reported that the test audience liked the film but agreed with Weinstein. Taymor dismissed the com- plaints. Weinstein, standing in front of the theatre's popcorn counter and hold- ing the questionnaire results in one hand, seemed briefly out of control. "You are the most arrogant person I have ever met," he said, ripping up the test results and dropping the scraps in front of Tay- mor, her collaborator and partner, Elliot Goldenthal, and other members of their production team. "I'm going to sell this to HBO," he said-meaning that he wouldn't release the movie in theatres, or that he might release it in theatres but skimp on marketing and yank it from circulation. The point was clear: this was Taymor's movie in name only: Weinstein walked away: A moment later, Weinstein reap- peared; he saw Taymor's agent, Bart Walker, of I.C.M., and yelled at him, "Get the fuck out of here!" To Gold- enthal, who wrote the score for "Frida," Weinstein said, "I don't like the look on your face." Then, according to several wit- nesses, he moved very close to Golden- thal and said, "Why don't you defend her so I can beat the shit out of you?" Gold- enthal quickly escorted Taymor away. When asked about this incident, Wein- stein insisted that he did not threaten Goldenthal, yet he concedes, '<I am not saying I was remotely hospitable. I did not behave well. I was not physically menacing to anybody: But I was rude and impolite." One member of Taymor's team described Weinstein's conduct as actually bordering on "criminal assault." Taymor thought of quitting or taking her name off the movie, fully expecting I I r- "., - '-. I r:F- -'. · Y . .., '1'm in this for the momentary haul" Miramax to abandon it-until, eventu- ally; Weinstein called to say that he really loved the movie and wanted to work WIth her. Taymor stayed in the picture. Mter Weinstein's blowup with Stacey Snider, and his subsequent apology; he promised that he wotÙd change-that he'd be more collegial and, several people say; consider attending anger-management classes. He says that after his exchange with JuJie Taymor he promised that if he had another tantrum he would give a hundred thousand dollars to Paul New- man's Hole in the Wall Gang camp for seriously ill children. Weinstein told me that his temper is "the thing I hate most about myself" H arvey Weinstein believes that these Hareups are simply the manifesta- tions of a passion for movies, and, at fifty; he sees himself in the tradition of such studio greats as Thalberg and David O. Selznick. He believes that the heads of the other major studios are even more in- trusive than he is, and he says, "They do it to make the movie commercial. I do it to protect the artistic integrity of an idea, and to help it be commercial. There should be creative tension. That's why I like David O. Selznick, not Harry Cohn. Cohn had no fucking taste." Cohn's crude, abusive behavior to just about everyone is legendary: Cohn's fu- neral, in 1958, was crowded, and Red Skelton supposedly remarked, "Well, it only proves what they always say-give the public something they want to see, and they'll come out for it." Cohn, like Weinstein, believed that conflict pro- duced superior work, and he made some fine movies: "It Happened One Night," ' the King's Men," "Born Yesterday;" and "The Caine Mutiny;" among others. Yet Weinstein, unlike Cohn, reads the scripts and books that Miramax buys, and in that way is closer to Selznick, who envisioned how "Gone with the Wind" could be brought to the screen. When I mentioned Cohn, Weinstein was not pleased. He looked down at his pack of Carltons. The top was ripped off so that he could more quickly grab a cigarette; he smokes several packs daily. He took a swig from a Diet Coke; one of his four aides always has a can ready before he sits down anywhere. Finally, he looked up and said, "Harry Cohn-that's the worst thing you could say to me. I don't think